Our week of ocean themed posts comes to an end with a new album from the Providence, Rhode Island based Shark’s Come Cruisin’. An energetic mix of sea shanties and maritime workers music. Live it’s all audience participation and celebration but can they transfer that into the studio?
Rhode Island is a U.S. state in New England known these days for it’s sandy shores and seaside Colonial towns. It is bordered by Massachusetts, Connecticut and the Atlantic Ocean so as you can imagine it has a history far beyond being a place for spoilt children to holiday. The smallest state in the union (only 48 miles long x 37 miles wide) it is one of the most densely populated with just over a million residents and of those a staggering 20% are of Irish ancestry. Middletown, Narragansett, Charlestown, Scituate and Jamestown still today have large Irish-American populations. With over 400 miles of coastline the Ocean State’s connection with Ireland is as old as the very state itself back to the early days of the Thirteen Colonies. George Berkeley settled in Middletown, in 1729 and then in the 19th century waves of Irish immigrants moved here, drawn by the city of Newport, a bustling seaport and it was Irish labour that built Fort Adams, a project that lasted from 1824 until 1857. By then the Irish were flooding into the state and the country drawn by the promise of a better life they were met with signs that read ‘No Irish Need Apply’ but the Irish persevered and eventually became not only accepted but the dominant force in the states political machine and it wasn’t long before Rhode Island became the first in the nation with a Catholic majority.
A working class state that relied heavily on fishing and its associated industry it has been hurt very hard by increasingly restrictive regulations that demand more and more cuts to the fishing fleets decimating not only jobs but whole communities while the local governments solution is to replace them with yuppies and students. Still, working class communities do not go gentle into the good night and resistance is strong but can it stand up to capital? The stories of the ocean are famed and one way the people keep them alive is through song. We’ve often featured sea-shanties here and as you’ll have seen this week has been one busy with the history of Grace O’Malley, Ireland’s feared female pirate Queen and a classics review / free download of the 1970’s compilation album Sea Songs and we finally bring the week to an end with an album of modern day sea songs and shanties and Celtic-Folk-Punk from Shark’s Come Cruisin’.
Shark’s Come Cruisin are well known up and down the East Coast, from Florida to Maine for their mix of sea shanties and maritime music and for hosting the monthly PVD Shanty Sing in their hometown of Providence. I Wish I Was On Gansett Bay is the bands third full length studio album following their debut A Past We Forget That We Need To Know in 2011 and When I Get Home From Across The Sea in 2018. Both collections of the famous and not so famous traditional songs, mainly but not completely of the sea. The band describe their new album as
“… a continuation of Sharks Come Cruisin’s musical progression to a more unplugged, layered sound, which is a departure from the band’s earlier, louder work. While the new album contains some of the earliest shanties that Mark Lambert, the band’s guitarist and lead vocalist, collected when he began researching sea shanty music in the early 2000s, the song arrangements on the new record reflect a dramatically different approach from the band’s first few releases.”
The album kicks off with ‘Sugar In The Hold’ and a slow dirgey yet really catchy track. It’s not the only song whose origins are obscure with it’s earliest record a newspaper article back in 1876. Accordion, banjo, fiddle, and melodica welcome us with the opening line
“I wish I was on Gansett Bay, raising pints in a neighbourly way.”
Straight from the off you get a warm feeling of a traditional song done with love, respect and excellent musicianship. This followed by ‘Ten Thousand Miles Away’ a song better known to many of us through the Wolfe Tones as ‘Blow Ye Winds’. Next is ‘Paddy And The Whale’ a song once recorded by Ewan MacColl about 1890’s Antarctic finn and blue whale fishing. Three tracks in and the Sharks Come Cruisin formula seems pretty clear. Excellent instrumentation with a strong main vocal performance from Mark backed up by the rest of the band singing along behind. The whole things adds up to what could be a live performance coming through the speakers. Ask any musician and they’ll tell you that transferring that live sound onto record is the hardest thing to do but Sharks Come Cruisin seem to have managed it with ease and in a very relaxed way to boot. ‘The Sailor Loves His Bottle’ is also one of a few here that will be familiar to the average listener but under a different name.
So far I Wish I Was On Gansett Bay is outstanding and but the proof of the pudding is on the originals and in ‘Charts’ they prove they can knock out an auld tune of their own too. Sadly it’s the only original here but that takes nothing away from the power of the album just that we would have loved to hear more. A haunting yet beautiful song that was first recorded for the 2016 album Kettle Jane but it took six years before they realised the song needed a key change. Sharks Come Cruisin are all about respecting tradition but it seems that a bloody good time can be had watching (and listening) to them too. ‘Sail Away Ladies’, ‘Pay Me Your Money Down’ and ‘Boston Harbour’ show the range of the bands material with Celtic, Americana, Country all sweeping in and out.
( Cinematographer & Editor: David Lawlor https://www.filmmakerdave.com/)
‘Where Am I To Go’ links in nicely with the album, Sea Songs – Louis Killen, Stan Hugill And The X-Seamen’s Institute, we featured last Thursday. The great Welsh singer Stan Hugill collected this song from a West Indies black shantyman called Harding the Barbadian Barbarian. Harding had served aboard Yankee, British, Bluenose, and West Indian vessels and was a “first-rate sailor” according to records. Even the ballads get you tapping the side of your leg. ‘Lady Franklin’s Lament’ begins with Mark’s frail vocal delivery and a faint guitar while the band slide in one by one with a beautiful accordion solo before the final, heartbreaking verse,
“Ten thousand pounds I would freely give, to know on earth my dear Franklin does live.”
The beauty of the song belies the tragedy within as sailor tells of his dreams about Lady Franklin speaking of her husband, Sir John Franklin, who went missing during his 1845 expedition through the Arctic Ocean in search of the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. ‘Whup Jamboree’ is another song taken from Kettle Jane and re-recorded for I Wish I Was On Gansett Bay with Brian Jablonski of Swamp Birds / The Low Cards guesting on steel pedal guitar. The album ends with ‘Ye Mariners All’ and perfectly rounds things off. A song we have thanks to Marina Russell, a pieceworker from the rural south who sang it to the folk song collectors, the Hammond brothers in Upwey, Dorset, in early 1907. It has been recorded several times by some pretty well known artists and her Sharks Come Cruisin make it their own with a slow burner bursting with emotion. A superb ending.
I Wish I Was On Gansett Bay was released on Friday and the band have several gigs lined up to promote the album starting with what sounds like a great gig at Narragansett Brewery in their home port of Providence, Rhode Island. The album is available on limited edition green vinyl, CD and digital download at the band’s website below. It’s also available through Bandcamp but as ever buy direct from the band if you can. This is only the bands third album and the first since 2018 (both previous albums available from Bandcamp) but this is far from a sign of inactivity as judging by their web site they are busy playing up and down the coast and inland. The music is entrenched in tradition and the surroundings they call home. It’s both flexible and sturdy, anthems flush with the lives of the people who sang these songs down through the years in conditions we can only dream of and a thousand nautical miles away from those soft handed drippy middle class townies who stole the limelight from this band who deserved it all.
(Download or stream I Wish I Was On Gansett Bay via Bandcamp below)
Buy I Wish I Was On Gansett Bay FromTheBand
Contact Shark’s Come Cruisin’ WebSite Facebook YouTube Instagram
LONDON CELTIC PUNKS WEB-ZINE 
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